Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton.

  • Harsanyi, Zsolt, 1944-
Date:
[1981], ©1981
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    50/360 (page 34)
    GENETIC PROPHECY: BEYOND THE DOUBLE HELIX to ignore it. Until 80 years ago, when we began to learn how to control infectious diseases, death nearly always seemed to strike from outside the body. From the days of the earliest cavemen, death was usually violent, caused by something foreign; and disease seemed just as alien. The nineteenth century painter Arnold Bocklin depicted The Plague as flying into a village on the back of a serpent. Others described death as an unwelcome and unexpected visitor, knocking on its victims' doors. These concepts were not mere superstitions. They were not simply founded on ignorance. Most illnesses and deaths were, in fact, attributable to accidents or to agents of disease which could be spread from person to person. Life and health were constantly threatened by uncontrollable vio¬ lence from without—by earthquakes and wars, by illnesses and accidents. And if these dangers were not enough, man¬ kind periodically faced devastating attacks from pestilential diseases that took on the entire world. In the year 541 A.D., a murderous epidemic, known as the Plague of Justinian—the first wave of the Black Death— reared its ugly head. It took hold and ruled the civilized world for more than fifty years. Procopius of Caesarea recorded what he saw then in Constantinople: During these times there was pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated ... It started from the Aegyptians who dwell in Pelusium. Then it divided and moved in one direction towards Alex¬ andria and the rest of Aegypt, and in the other it came to Palestine on the border of Aegypt; and from there it spread over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favorable to it. For it seemed to move by fixed ar¬ rangement, and to tarry for a specified time in each coun¬ try. ... The perception that disease was an external evil was [ 34 1